Episode 436 Scott Adams: Free Speech on Campus, a Patreon Replacement, Trump’s Speech, Healthcare

Hey, everybody, come on in here. It's time for coffee with Scott Adams. Possibly the best part of your day. I don't like to ruin the rest of your day, but this might be the best part because it involves coffee or your favorite beverage. It involves the simultaneous sip. It involves all of you. What could be better? Now if you would grab your cup, your mug, your stein, your chalice, your thermos, if you will. I hope it's filled with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me for the simultaneous session. Good stuff. So how many of you saw the President's speech at cpac? I did not watch all of it, but I saw lots of clips. I saw the good parts and then I saw what people said about it. Predictably, the people who do not like the President said, well, that's a wild, disjointed, crazy thing. That means nothing. And the people who like the President and even the people who were sort of in the middle said to themselves, oh, I think I just see the future. You know what the future looks like? The future looks like that guy you saw at sepac, the one hugging the American flag, the one doing two hours of impeccable stand up. Riffing for two hours on all of his greatest hits, owning the audience, capturing the headlines, bringing energy, humor, vision. Introduces his new idea for limiting funding to colleges based on whether they support free speech. Can you believe this? President is going to be running for re election on a platform of free speech. Just think about that just for a moment, because the news just sort of mentions it and moves on. But just think of the enormity of that. He's running on a platform of free speech. Oh, my God. Now who would have thought that was even going to be an opportunity? Who would have imagined that running for President on a platform of freedom of speech would even be a thing, that it would even be necessary. So we don't know yet what the President has in mind for his executive order, but just the fact that he's talking about it is politically insanely good. You know, powerful and also useful. People always tell me that they're afraid of the slippery slope. You know, the slippery slope, if things start going in one direction, they're just going to keep going. And I always say the same thing. The slippery slope is an illusion because everything in reality goes until there's a reason for it to stop. And if there is no reason for it to stop, one always presents itself. Because people don't like things going forever in the same direction. If it's heading in a bad Direction. So you just watched the slippery slope go pump. I think the slippery slope just hit a brick wall, did it not? Because you were thinking to yourself, man, this is a slippery slope. You know, they're banning a conservative. Okay, you know, maybe that conservative you can understand, because they were. They were not just being conservative. They were being outrageous in a way that even, you know, everybody might be a little offended by. And then you say, well, that was just that one person, though. And then there's another one. You say, two. Oh, my God. Well, but it was just two. And they were both pretty outrageous. And then there's another one, and then there's another one. And suddenly you say to yourself, I think there's a slippery slope. It feels like free speech is actually, like, literally under attack, and then something changes. The slippery slope is not a real thing. It is absolutely an illusion, which is an illusion because we're afraid that it's real. If we are not afraid that it was real, we might not act. But you see the President acting. So that slippery slope just came to a screeching end. It didn't fix all the issues of free speech. Certainly, one to one, the way we treat each other is still a big problem. If you can't wear a T shirt in public because it has an unpopular slogan on it, that's a problem. But this college censorship thing was a bigger one, more central to free speech, if you will. And it looks like the slippery slope just stopped, as it always does. There's always a competing force that rises up. Let me give you another example. You know that there were platforms that have been defunding conservatives, and you say to yourself, my God, if they keep, you know, not defunding, but, well, also defunding. But if they keep deplatforming conservatives, the slippery slope, it'll get worse and worse. Then Patreon started dropping people for things they had done, not even on the platform. So is that a slippery slope in which conservatives will all be deplatformed and cannot get the funding for what they're doing? Well, it would be, except forces jump up to stop the slippery slope. As luck would have it, and this is completely coincidental, but my company, Zap, just released a replacement for Patreon. So Patreon decided it wanted to stab conservatives in the back, and it looked like that stabbing was just going to go on forever. But the way the world works is that counter forces rise. I won't call it a pivot because our original app still does the same thing, which is you can call an expert on any topic if that expert is online and you can pay for their time based on whatever rate they give you. But we've added, and I'll just show you an example, you can go to an expert. Now, these experts don't have to be online. These are people who have signed up at one time or another so that their profiles are in the system. So let's say I wanted to give a donation to Carpe Dunctum. Do you all know Carpe? Carpe Dankdum, that's the Twitter handle for gentleman who does a lot of the memes that you enjoy. So let's say you wanted to give him a donation the same way you would do on Patreon, but you don't want to use Patreon. So you can use the interface by wenhub app. It's a free app. You just sign up. You download it and sign up and then you would just go to the search box. It's the first thing that comes up. I'll just put in Carpe. And he pops up in the list. In the search list, he's right at the top. So here he is. You can see it took him probably 60 seconds to upload a picture and then write a couple of sentences about who he is. Now, if I didn't already know him, I wouldn't know for sure this was really his account. So. So you might want to make sure that you're really donating to a real person. So if you've seen it on Twitter that they have this or they mention it on their website, that'd be a little safer than just assuming you know the person. But you can make a donation. Or if he were online, you could connect with him to talk live. Alright, he's not online right now. And if he had a schedule, he could put a schedule of when he's available, you could book him, but he doesn't have that active right now. But he does have a button here and everybody has that. So here you. Starts at a dollar, but you can, you can click more. Let's say I'll give him two dollars. And this is the feature that we just added. It's hard to see. Let me change the. See if I can change the lighting on here to make it easier to read. It's a little easier, right? So now I just signed up for $2 and I'm going to click either one time or recurring. If I click recurring, then every month I'll be charged until I turn it off. So I can just turn it off in the App as well. So I'm going to say recurring monthly. So this is just what Patreon does. It's the same function. And then I'm going to say your. Let me say, I'll just put a little note there. I'll just say hi for now and put in my little note, hit the pay button. It asks for my fingerprint. So I'm just put my thumb on there and boom, done. All right, so I just made a donation to the best conservative meme maker in the world right now. By the way, President Trump retweeted Carpe Dunktum's meme recently. You probably saw that. So that is the option now. So you see that every time there's a slippery slope, there are counter forces that usually the free market kicks up or politics kicks up, in the case of President Trump, to counter it. Now, anybody who wants to be on the app can just sign up. Takes about 60 seconds. Put your photo there, put your price. You don't even have to be available for calls. You can just put your profile there. Then anybody can donate to you. We're adding, I don't have an update on this. I think in the next few days we're going to be adding a button that you can add to your webpage or add to your profile. So if somebody sees on Twitter, for example, that you have this, you just click the link and it will take you right to the app. By the way, the app exists as a browser page as well. So it works on Apple, it works on Google, it works on any kind of browser. All right, let us go on. I saw that CNN is reporting that this week was a, what they call it a. It was an epically bad week. This is Chris Soliza's article, his opinion on CNN's website that it was an epically bad week for the president. And I read the headline and I thought, did I miss something? Is there something epically bad that happened that I missed? And, and so I look at his list of epically bad things. Number one was the Cohen testimony. And I thought to myself, was it epically bad that collusion has just been eliminated from the headlines and that all we learned was stuff we knew before it was the most nothing of. I mean, for me, it just looked exculpatory to the point where it embarrassed the media who has been talking about all of these alleged crimes for two and a half years or whatever. So I thought, well, that's pretty hard to turn that into a negative. But they did. The other negative in his epically bad week was that he didn't get complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. To which I say, wait a minute, isn't the President demonstrating right in front of the world how to turn an enemy into a frenemy, or at least maybe an ally or even an investment partner? President Trump eliminated the nuclear risk in North Korea and that's called a bad week. What would a good week look like? How hard would he have to work to have a good week? Come on, that was one of the best weeks of any president ever. The fact that it didn't get some specific little goal related result shows you again that difference between. I speculate this, by the way, this is not a scientific statement, but I speculate that one of the differences between the left and the right politically is that the left is goal oriented. So they went in thinking, he's got to get this specific result, he's got to get complete denuclearization in this meeting. That's the goal. And then it didn't happen. So their goal was not met. Conservatives, and especially in the Trump world seem to be systems oriented. Meaning that do you have a good system in place? Do you have a constitution, your capitalism is working, you've got rule of law, you know, systems. And so when they watch the President go to this meeting, they say, oh, this is a hundred year plan to make sure that North Korea stays on the path from mortal enemy to good buddy with a good economy. There's no reason that had to happen Tuesday. There's just no reason because the system is working. The system in this case is to have a personal relationship with the leader, convince them what they the future could look like, work on all the details, have an open line of communication, set up some teams to talk to them on a regular basis, move a little bit at a time with South Korea until the odds of a nuclear war slowly go down to zero. Then the other things that they mentioned about Trump's epically bad week is that Felix Sater, apparently some sketchy Russian character who had dealings with both Trump and of course everybody over there who has more than $100 is connected to the Kremlin. And so Soliza says that Trump had an epically bad week in part because Felix Sater is going to testify next week. So I didn't say that wrong. So Soliza's list of why this week was an epically bad week is because next week somebody is going to testify and probably will have as much to say as Cohen, which is interesting, but not really illegal and not really news. So if that's all you got, if all you got for your epically bad week is two things that went great and something that might happen next week. Anyway, yeah, I always cough in the morning. I'm full of allergies until I take my allergy meds after I do these periscopes. All right, so also in the news, a tragic story that hit me a little harder than it hit most of you probably. You probably saw in the headlines that founder of Square One of the co founders, Tristan O'Tierney died suddenly at age 35. The reported cause is related to addiction. We don't know the details, but when a 35 year old dies from addiction, I'm thinking opioids. That would be my assumption. I don't want to get ahead of the story because today's more the day you think about the family and the departed. But I don't think we can ignore the immensity of the problem. And so this, this gets me to another topic, which is how do you get. And I'll connect these dots in a minute, but this, this makes me, makes me think about health care costs and how close we are to a low cost healthcare solution. I want to give you a sense of this just by breaking it down this way. If you look at the components of healthcare from your doctors and your nurses, your medicines, your lab tests, your supplies and your MRIs, MRIs being just a stand in for scanning the body in a variety of ways, all of these have big changes happening right now that should lower the cost if everything went right. I talked about my app interface by wenhub. We're adding some doctors on there. And the tie in to the story about Tristan Tierney is that most of you know I lost my stepson a few months ago to an opioid overdose. And one of the things I learned in that process of, you know, the, I guess I would call it the slow, inevitable death of my own stepson is that one of the biggest issues is finding somebody to talk to when you have the urge to use. And apparently addicts will tell you that. It's very hard to find somebody at the moment you need them most. In other words, a sponsor, somebody to talk to, an expert, a therapist, when you need them. Because when you need them, it's kind of critical, right? Because when you want to use, you want to use. Right now you don't want to make an appointment for next week. And so one of the functions of the interface by WinHub app is, I'll give you an example. If you put in addiction, You'll see a list of people who are experts on addiction. Among them, let's see if Dr. Drew is still on here. I noticed that Dr. Drew had signed up and yeah, Pinsky, MD. Now he's not online right now, but he has a profile set up. And should there be enough customers and enough demand, you would be able to actually get a hold of Dr. Drew himself if he were live on the app right now. And imagine the benefit of being able to reach for your phone and talk to somebody and not everybody is going to be a doctor Drew level expense. But obviously if you're the founder of Square, you could afford to talk to somebody who really, really knows what they're doing here. But just talking to somebody who's been through it, somebody who's had the same issues. And by the way, this would work for PTSD as well. A lot of people with PTSD just sort of need to talk to somebody who also has been through the same situation. So an app, of course, is not a full replacement for a live therapist, a live doctor or live sponsor, but if you need it quickly, you need it. So this gives you the promise of lowering the cost of the doctor visits or even not having to have insurance. And if you need it, you just get your doctor advice when you need it. I imagine there will be more apps for nurses because there's probably always an off duty nurse somewhere in your neighborhood who would come to you if you just, you know, call them up in your app and say, I need something looked at or bandaged or, you know, something like that. I need to get a shot, something like that. So I don't know of any apps that do that have a nurse come to your house. But it makes sense that will emerge. If it doesn't exist, it already will. And it probably exists, by the way. I assume it does exist. I just don't know what it is yet. You'll see the cost of meds probably gives some downward pressure. You see that the Trump administration has an effort now to speed generics. Now, apparently the economic rule that they've discovered is that the price of medicine doesn't go down a lot until the third generic. I can't remember if it's the second generic in addition to the original or if it's the third generic. But something like that, you have to get an additional generic in the market before they compete and the prices go down. So the administration has sped up the approval of generics, which should have an impact on drug prices. We also know that Amazon is part of the triumvirate with JP Morgan Chase and the other company, is it Apple? I can't remember who is the third company, but you know what I'm talking about. So they'll probably have an impact on negotiating power. Oh, Berkshire Hathaway. Right, sorry, Berkshire Hathaway, Amazon, JP Morgan Chase, they will probably have some impact on drug prices. So that's good news. There are a number of startups, they're looking to lower the price of lab tests so you wouldn't need to go through your hospital, your normal doctor process. There would be an expedited, quick, low cost way to do it because technology has allowed the price of this to go way down. Supplies. We're probably at the place where you could 3D print a lot of your supplies or you could have Amazon deliver them at what will probably be a lower cost in the future. And then there are a number of startups who are working on things like MRIs and scanners, things that would look at your body, find out what's wrong. And you could have. Apparently artificial intelligence is already better at reading scans than humans. If you're trying to detect cancer, for example, you'd be better off having the AI look at your scans than you would having a human being. So these are all the things that are happening right now. If you took this collection of stuff and you added on top of it catastrophic healthcare insurance. So the expensive stuff when you have to go in and get an operation or its end of life situation, that sort of thing. So if the only insurance you needed theoretically was maybe a little insurance for your meds and some catastrophic insurance, and then you just pay cash for the rest, or you pay a monthly direct care doctor situation, you can see that there probably is opening up what I would call the poor man's health insurance. So the poor man's health insurance basically takes advantage of the, the new trends, the, you know, the apps, the low cost stuff, the, the tests, the, the startup developed stuff. And with that some catastrophic insurance, which wouldn't be much because it's just the catastrophic part. So we probably are on the cusp of, of having something like a poor person option. Poor meaning, you know, let's say a 20something who doesn't make a lot of money yet. So in my, you know, they don't have to be suffering, they just have to not have high income yet. So this is all good news. And if you would like to help make this happen, anything you can do to use or promote the interface by wenhub app should make a difference for addicts who need to find a sponsor, somebody to talk to, should make a difference for health care if this type of thing catches on. We're not. We're not the only people in the telehealth market. That's a. It's a big burgeoning market. Anyway, let's change the topic. I'm getting into conversations on Twitter about President Trump's, quote, joke about Russia. Hey, Russia, if you have Hillary's emails, can you release them? And people are talking about whether he was really asking them to do it or was it a joke? And I, of course, have been saying, you couldn't tell that was a joke. And then other people who say, oh, sure, it was a joke, but he really was also asking. So maybe it was a joke, but that doesn't change the fact he actually literally asked Russia to help him win an election. To which I say, what does it mean to ask for something that everybody wants? So in other words, if I say to you, I want oxygen, what's your reaction to that? I want oxygen. Yeah, I think everybody should have oxygen. You'd say, I think, Scott, you've said absolutely nothing, because every person agrees with that. Everybody wants oxygen. You didn't even need to say was unnecessary to say you like oxygen because we pretty much knew that we all are on the same page with the oxygen. So when a candidate says any version of, I sure would like it if my opponent were embarrassed by a release of their information. Have you really said anything? Is there anybody who wouldn't be happy to see their opponent's embarrassing information be revealed in the context of an election? No, there's nobody who doesn't want that to happen. The joke is that he said it. It's the saying it in public and in the ways he said it, which is the funny part. Now, some of my critics said, oh, sure, but what about the next time he said it? Because he didn't just say it that one time, I guess he said it in an interview where he was in a less joking mood. To which I say, again, you, is it news if I say I like oxygen? It shouldn't be, because you probably should have figured that out on your own. So is it news that a candidate wants Russia or anybody else wouldn't matter who it was, would like them to release any embarrassing information on your opponent that they have? Of course you want that. Anybody who says they don't want that would just be a transparent liar. It would be like me saying, you know, I don't like oxygen. I don't like it. All right, so I see some of you still are having some afterglow from the President's speech that you liked so much. His supporters liked it, his critics hated it, per usual. And one of the things you should know is that he was talking to a young crowd, and you saw how the President adjusted his approach to the audience. They were sort of a young, edgy crowd, and he said bullshit twice, which they loved, because it was inappropriate, which is why they loved it. He hugged the flag. You know, he went through all of his best jokes. So he put on quite a show. Now, I don't know if this transformation has yet happened, but do you remember early on in 2015, 2016, the big complaint about Trump is that he was just a reality star, that he was just an entertainer, essentially, and people dismissed him for being a reality TV star. You don't hear that as much, do you? Because when you watched his speech as cpac, you probably said to yourself something like I said to myself, which is, this is a man who understands this medium like crazy. He understands it better than it has ever been understood by a candidate. Now, I would say that Reagan was also a genius in terms of the communication element of it, but he was in a different time. Reagan didn't have the Internet. He was sort of a TV personality. Trump is all of that, plus a lot more, because he's got the social media understanding. He's the best social media user of all time, I would say. I think that that's just clearly true, in my opinion. And we watch how he uses entertainment as a political tool. Now, if all you thought was, well, this is a political realm and he's an entertainer, so those are not the same thing. So he's a round peg in a square hole. Well, that wasn't stupid. I mean, it wasn't ridiculous to say he's not bringing the right kind of skill, that we accept that we expect to be useful. And you may remember that from the very beginning, I was saying, I think they're seeing this wrong, because if you're trying to persuade, at least half of the job of persuading is getting attention. If you can't get attention, there's nothing else that matters. So he gets attention better than anybody ever has, I would say. And then he puts his messages in simple, repeatable, memorable, provocative frames that become a permanent part of your head. So the two parts of persuasion getting your attention the best there's ever been, nobody has ever been better. And I feel confident in saying that certainly in the political realm, no one's ever been better at getting attention than he does, than he is. So that's half of persuasion. The other half is, are you visual, are you provocative so that people remember it. It has to be a little bit wrong for people to remember it. He does a little bit wrong so consistently well that it's crazy. It's just crazy how consistently he gives you a thought that's just a little attenuated from what you thought was normal. Just a little extra every time. It's never just, here's your cake, it's always cake with. And here's the ice cream on top. There's always a little extra. And so he's the best there's ever been at that. Now, when you watch his CPAC speech and Nick Gillespie wrote a great article, I tweeted on this for a reason, reason being the publication that when you see him do, I would say the mature president version of himself, because before he was the non president trying to become a president, that's a whole different feel. But you saw his confidence. Did you see how much confidence he had at that CPAC speech? It was crazy. He was so relaxed and confident that you just feel that you feel the confidence. It feels good. So if you imagine the best Democrat in the race, whoever you think that's going to be, just do this funny mental exercise. You know, imagine it's the future. It's 2020 and we're having some debates and we're down to the final two. So you've got Trump, he's one of them. And the other is you can, you can cycle through whichever of the faces of the Democrats you think is your best choice, and it's Joe Biden. Oh, my God. Joe Biden just disappears, doesn't he? The contrast between them. Well, let me put it this way. If you started with Donald Trump and then you said, okay, here are all the qualities of Trump, and now we're one by one, like a Jenga game, we're going to remove Trump's best qualities. Okay, we'll take out, this is persuasion, his charisma. We'll take out his sense of humor and everything. Once you've removed all of that, what would you have left? Joe Biden. If you took everything that was good away from Trump, what would be left would be Joe Biden. There's no way that that matchup could possibly be a winner for the Democrats if you put Trump next to Bernie. Here's another mental exercise for you. Imagine Trump and Bernie on stage. And now do a sort of an imagination exercise. Where you say, what do you think of when you think of Trump? That's not a person, right? An object or an event or a thing. What is the thing or other thing you think of when you see Trump? And then what's the thing you think of when you see Bernie? When I see Trump, I think of a flame, don't you? Because it's energy and it's orange and it's red hot and it's flaming. When you see Trump, you almost see a flame. It's like a fireplace. All right, that's Trump. Now move over on the stage and imagine Bernie. When I see Bernie, I always imagine a dandelion in its final days. You know, when a dandelion turns into one of those. I don't know what they're called when they just have wisps of white stuff that you can blow away like that. Don't you see it now? You see a flame, energy, heat, you know, life. And then you see this little, this tired, little worn out dandelion. And you can go right down the line. Elizabeth Warren disappears. Now, Kamala Harris, she is probably the best they have, but she only looks good compared to the other Democrats. As soon as you imagine her on stage, isn't she just Hillary Clinton? She's just sort of Hillary Clinton, isn't she? And it's just going to look like you've seen this before. So I believe she'll probably do a good job debating. She's probably good at that. But he just has that extra sizzle that nobody's going to come close to draw us a cartoon. Somebody says in all caps. All right, I think that's all I have to say. Today I'm going to be. Next week I'm going to be trying out the Periscope upgrade that allows you to add guests, which I've used before. But the upgrade allows you to send out the Twitter notification. Also before, those two features didn't work at the same time. And I think the, the new version this coming week will allow me to do that. So we'll have some guests on next week. Anyway, I hope you try out interface by wenhub and I will talk to you later.